Project No.: 5003-051341 01.12.97 - 30.04.2000

Project leader: Prof. Hans-Jörg Schek, Institut für Informationssysteme, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETHZ)
e-mail: schek@inf.ethz.ch

Name of project: WISE: Workflow-based Internet services (second series)

Partners:
Prof. Bernhard Plattner, Inst. für techn. Informatik und Kommunikationsnetze, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETHZ)
Dr. Heinz Lienhard, IvyTeam, Zug
Urs Jenny, onlineSOLUTIONS GmbH, Rickenbach

Funding: Sfr 653,393.-

Summary:
Nowadays value-added chains in both the service and industrial sectors are becoming more and more segmented, leading to the growing importance of an inter-company control system for the entire process chains. However, this must not be proprietary. The WISE (Workflow based Internet SErvices) project aims at designing, building and testing a commercially viable infrastructure for developing distributed applications over the Internet.

The project features the following components:

• An Internet workflow engine directs the execution of the distributed applications, acting as an operating system controlling the distributed processes on the Internet.
• A set of brokers enables interaction with already existing systems that are to be used as building blocks.
• Tools allow final users to configure and develop the applications to be developed on a high level (programming in the large).

Reaching the project goals will require innovated solutions to several problems:

• Current commercial workflow systems derived from the fields of office communications, image processing or computer-aided group work, may be considered as the forerunners. However, they are aimed at relatively small user groups and leave something to be desired in terms of perfmance, scaleability and reliability.
• They are based on local networks (LANs), whereas the Internet constitutes a more universal infrastructure. This means that such tools must work federatively in heterogeneous environments because each end-user uses his own system. Brokers therefore need to be developed capable of working with various existing applications.
• Shortfalls in performance, scalability and reliability are due to architectural restrictions, which have to be fundamentally addressed (e.g. restriction to a few databases). Current process modelling tools are not powerful enough; the available operations need expanding.

Cooperation:
The present project is a cooperative effort by the database group of the institute for technical IT and communication networks of ETH Zurich, the IvyTeam company, which took part in the SPP IF program (1992-95) in the field of process modelling, and of onlineSOLUTIONS, which as an Internet service provider and consultancy provides the testbed for the project.